Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

I couldn’t take any more. I felt stupid for having made so much fuss about being beaten by the police when I was fifteen. I looked at Dr Song and said, ‘At school, the only thing they told us about the Cultural Revolution was that three million people lost their lives. But I never really grasped the scale of the horror. I was only ten when it came to an end.’

‘We received death threats while researching this material. The national government told us to carry out this research, but the county authorities refused to cooperate because most of the people who organised the atrocities are now high officials in the local government. This whole project is a sham. Only five copies of these chronicles have been published. I doubt the public will ever get to read them. Once the victims we’ve listed have been rehabilitated, the chronicles will probably be locked away in the government vaults. None of the top officials will lose their job.’

Dr Song lifted the lid of my teacup and said, ‘Drink up before it gets cold.’ I pretended to take a sip. I felt too sick to swallow anything, or to leaf through the two volumes he handed me: Chronicles of the Cultural Revolution in Liuzhou County , and Chronicles of the Cultural Revolution in Nanning District . I longed to escape this dark and dismal office.

I thought of my father’s journal which was lying at the bottom of my bag, but I didn’t feel in the mood to take it out and enquire about all the people who were mentioned in it. All I could bring myself to ask was: ‘Does Director Liu’s daughter, Liu Ping, still play the violin? Is she still living in Wuxuan?’

‘Liu Ping was only sixteen when they killed her. She was the prettiest girl on the farm. She could dance and play the violin. The night the militia killed her father, they raped her, then strangled her with a piece of rope. Once she was dead, they cut off her breasts and gouged out her liver, then fried them in oil and ate them.’ Dr Song flicked to another page in the book. ‘Look, here’s a photograph of Director Liu’s family. The printing is very poor. That girl in the white skirt holding the violin is Liu Ping.’

It was just like the photograph my father had shown me, but in this one Liu Ping’s chin was raised a little higher. I was certain that my father had taken this one as well.

The sky outside the window was black now. My hands and feet were as cold as ice. I got up and said that it was time for me to go.

‘You’ve missed the last bus back to Liuzhou, I’m afraid. You’d better spend the night in the county guest house. There’ll be another bus in the morning.’

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t think of anything to say. All I wanted was to feel some sunlight on my face. I’d grown up reading sheet after sheet of public notices containing lists of executed criminals: thousands of names written in black ink, each one marked with a red cross. But the horror of the deaths hadn’t struck me properly until now. I remembered how after some school friends and I noticed the name Chen Bin on one of the lists, we ran over to our classmate who shared the same name, drew pink crosses all over him and cried out, ‘Only your death will assuage the people’s anger! Bang, bang!’ But in Dr Song’s office, I felt real terror, in a physical way that I hadn’t experienced before.

I briefly flicked through the Chronicles of the Cultural Revolution in Guilin District , remembering that I’d planned to go travelling there with A-Mei, then I got up, hurriedly shook the doctor’s hand and left.

As I walked from his office to the guest house, the skin on my back went numb. I sensed that everyone around me — the people walking behind me, towards me, or milling around on the street, and even the legless beggar sitting propped up against the lamp post — was about to pounce on me and eat me alive.

The night passed very slowly. Dr Song’s revelations had disturbed me so much that I didn’t dare close my eyes. While stroking and kissing A-Mei the night before, I’d come three times, so I was weak with exhaustion now, shuddering like a plane spiralling out of control. But despite my tiredness, I didn’t sleep all night.

The circular paths inside your body lead nowhere. There’s no route that will take you to the outside world.

The next morning I caught the first bus back to Liuzhou and arrived in the afternoon in a confused daze.

A-Mei was surprised to see me, because I’d told her I’d be away a week. The only explanation I gave was that the people I’d intended to visit had died.

‘How come you didn’t know that before you left?’ she asked.

‘They were friends of my father’s. I never met them.’

‘When did they die?’

‘In the Cultural Revolution.’

‘Put that cigarette out. You shouldn’t smoke so much. Your hair and clothes stink of tobacco.’ Then she said that she was only a baby when the Cultural Revolution started, but when she was older, her parents told her that during the violent years corpses with bound hands and feet would float down from China into the harbours of Hong Kong every day.

I didn’t want to talk about this subject any more. I told her I wanted to travel up to Beijing a few days earlier than I’d planned.

She stared at me blankly for a moment, and said, ‘Fine. I’ll go back to Hong Kong a bit earlier too, then.’

We decided that we’d set off for Guilin the next morning, stay there a few days, then go our separate ways.

I was aware that a change had taken place in me. I’d acquired that cold detachment one develops after experiencing a traumatic event. On the long-distance bus to Guilin, I didn’t hold A-Mei’s hand. I felt uncomfortable when her leg brushed against mine. A-Mei looked sad. I guessed that she thought I’d lost interest in her.

I hardly said a word during our time in Guilin, and she didn’t say much either. The intimacy that we had so recently established seemed to have evaporated. I knew that any show of affection would seem false, so I didn’t dare touch her, let alone kiss her. When I sat opposite her in a restaurant, all I was aware of was the oily stench from the kitchen. The neurons she’d brought to life in the emotional centres of my brain seemed to have withered and died. I felt out of kilter. The sunlight and the sky felt muggy and close.

On Guilin’s Elephant Trunk Hill, I asked her if she wanted me to take a photograph of her. She said no. I was relieved, because I felt incapable of fixing my attention on her.

A crowd of foreign tourists poured out of a coach, their blonde hair glinting in the sun. They put on multicoloured sun hats and smiled as they stood waiting for their photographs to be taken in front of the scenic backdrop. I wanted to tell them to run away, because the bodies of 100,000 massacred people were buried under their feet. They had no idea that China was a vast graveyard.

The following evening we moved to a new hostel. The girl at reception wasn’t very experienced, and let A-Mei and me share the same room. It was a large dorm with seven single beds. We were the only guests.

After I blew out the candle, A-Mei felt afraid, and so did I, so we squeezed up together on one of the single beds and held each other.

I started to cry. I told her that I was upset on my father’s behalf. The people he’d wanted me to visit were dead. She said that after her grandmother died, she was so upset, she didn’t eat or sleep for a week, so she understood how I felt.

I told her that this was the first time that I’d shared a bed with a girl. She said it was the first time she’d shared a bed with a boy. I felt a desire stir within me. In the dark cavernous room, her limbs were warm and alive. We rolled over each other on the bed. I couldn’t seem to keep hold of her. Her soft skin slipped through my fingers. Now and then the smells of her body, her face cream, and the odour of sweat previous guests had left on the pillow and mattress would rise into the air between us and be drawn into our lungs.